


Ebb and Flow

by annieke



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Coda, Comfort/Angst, M/M, Series Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 16:30:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annieke/pseuds/annieke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're both just trying to deal with what happened at the end of this day, but it's hard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ebb and Flow

**Author's Note:**

> This is a coda to the Season 3 finale, _Aloha, Malama Pono_
> 
> Just kind of wondered what was going through their minds as they drove away from the pier area.  
> This kind of fell on me, when I really have other things to be writing. Hope you enjoy!

“So, Steve…you okay?”

Silence, and okay, okay. Not surprising. Not hard to figure. Danny can tell Steve’s not really paying attention to much right now, he gets it—lord, does he get it—but still….

It’s been a crazy motherfucker of a day, and so sue him that a part of him feels the need for a little reassurance that the man with the brooding face over there really is okay. He’s feeling a not so small measure of shaky ground under his own feet, a feeling not too dissimilar to the faint tremor that precedes the rug being pulled out from under—and, goddammit, he refuses to think they’ve all been sideswiped, somehow, that anything other than they’re all going to be okay will be the ultimate end result here. 

Still, though—Steve. Steve has to be riding the edge of feeling totally fucked.

“What, Danny? You say something?"

“Huh?” Danny turns again to Steve, realizing this time that Steve just did answer him, sort of, but the man’s already back to peering out the Camaro's windshield. Even from this angle, Danny can tell Steve’s not truly seeing the road; they’re both looking way beyond what’s just outside the car's windows, he knows this. Lets a hand rise and then drop in frustration, when he answers. “No, I didn’t—not really.”

Steve glances at him again, then back to the road. “Whatever you say, but it’s not like I can’t hear you mumbling.”

“Yeah, well, I was just….” His voice trails off into the air because asking just doesn’t seem to matter when he already knows the answer, and he hand waves it away because Steve will just tell him that he’s fine, anyway, even when that’s just a pale shade of the whole truth. For any of them. “Never mind. I wasn’t really saying anything.”

None of them are truly okay. Kono’s gone. Chin—Chin must be beside himself. Cool on the surface as he was tonight with his, ‘follow your heart,’ advice to Kono, just standing there watching them board that cargo ship. Looking calm. Reserved--but most likely shitting a brick in reality, Danny figures. That’s what he’d be doing. What he kind of is doing.

Shitting bricks as he mentally ticks off each of the night's developments. The biggest brick being Kono, who’s now…gone. Gone. Doris, gone. Of course, he thinks, that’s not such a bad thing, right? Let that woman wreak havoc overseas. Let anybody else have to deal with her but Steve. Any where other than here causing any more anguish than she has already.

Still, though. Their lives just drastically changed from one moment to the next tonight, and there’s nothing any of them can do to alter things. Fix things.

He glances in the side mirror at the set of headlights behind them, the reflection there shining almost too brightly back at him. Catherine’s car. _'Objects are closer than they appear,’_ the mirror reads. How very fucking fitting.

She was there tonight, too. Appeared almost out of thin air, really. Seems like wherever Steve goes, there, too, goes Catherine, these days. Not his girlfriend, though, right Steve? Yeah, because that makes so much sense.

Kind of funny, really, and odd, that Steve chose to jump behind the wheel of the Camaro as they were leaving the docks tonight, Catherine just standing there by her own car, a look of 'what the hell just happened here' on her face. Then again, they all kind of had that expression, and it occurs to Danny that maybe she just doesn't allow Steve to drive her car. Wouldn’t that be all kinds of hilarious. Very funny—or would be if it weren't for the fact that she’s with Steve and he isn’t. 

He’s got to let them go, those thoughts that sit and stew in the back of his mind. The ones that keep pushing at him, telling him that he and Steve have been working toward something really great after all these months—years--something inevitable. Something that has to be. He has to stop thinking that the undercurrent of electricity that seems to connect whenever they’re close to one another is actually real and anything more than just a great partnership. Working partnership.

Clearly, it’s all one sided. Clearly, he’s the only one of them who felt that visceral connection, which, as of late, seems more of a disconnect than anything else anyway. Not like he and Steve have done much talking these past months, especially since Doris came crawling back into Steve’s life, the crazed zombie-of-the-dead that she is--and Jesus, he sounds like some kind of disgruntled, jilted spouse. God, he’s had partners before and never felt like this. Then again, he never had the just completely base urge to drill any of those partners into the mattress before, either—a fantasy that’s played out in his head and under his own hands over more nights than he’d care to admit.

What the hell is his life these days?

It has to stop. He has to stop. Stop dwelling on what is or, more likely, isn’t going to happen between him and Steve, and just get through the rest of the night. Right now. This night--they’re all feeling too much, too deeply.

Chin said he was heading to the office to do some sorting of things, leaving them all standing there inhaling his dust as he peeled his bike out of there like a bat out of hell. Danny’s fairly sure that 'sorting out' actually means sitting and staring at Kono’s now empty desk and empty office, possibly blaming himself for all the shit that’s gone down over the past few days. Not that it's any of Chin's fault. Not that it's any of anyone's fault, really, except maybe Michael Noshimuri’s--but then, he’s dead. By his brother’s hand, no less, and if that doesn’t send unwanted memories of pointing his own gun at Matty that last day he was with him—

Fuck it-fuck it-fuck it all. Just fuck. It all played out like a horrible movie with a preposterous script that no screenwriter with any talent whatsoever would ever have put together. It’s all too unimaginably fucked up.

He feels like shit. Strung out and disheveled and threadbare. Presses fingertips to his temples with the hope of warding off the impending headache that’s already begun its slow pulse behind his eyes and isn’t going to get any better until it gets really much worse. He can already tell.

If Grace weren’t off on some weekend trip to Maui with Rachel and Stan—he can't bring himself to think family vacation—he’d go find her and wrap himself around her and never let go. But she’s away until Monday, and he’s got nowhere to go but an empty apartment filled with more silence than he'll be able to stand, and a head filled with echoes of today’s actions which he so doesn’t want to replay and yet knows that’s exactly what is going to happen the minute he’s left to his own devices. He really doesn't want to be alone, but the one person he’d like to be with to help keep the insanity at bay happens to be sitting not a foot and a half away, with his girlfriend speeding along right behind them.

Yeah. Life pretty much just sucks.

There’s a six-pack waiting in the refrigerator in his kitchen, though. So that’s kind of a win if he doesn't think too hard about how pathetic it makes him to be drinking it down all by himself—but tomorrow’s Saturday which means he can chug it all tonight, put on some shitty TV and then sleep in as long as he wants to in the morning. Assuming he actually sleeps.

“What?” Steve suddenly asks, looking over at him and from his expression, Danny figures he's more than likely going to be taking a six-pack in hand as well. Or a bottle or two--only Steve's probably not going to be drinking alone.

“What, what?" Danny just doesn't know what to say anymore, and half-grimaces over that thought, too, because on the whole of things, him being at a loss for words is a rarity, for sure. Thing is, it’s gotten to the point he just doesn’t even know what the questions should be. His mind feels numb.

“I don’t know ‘what’, Danny, that’s why I’m asking you. You keep, I don't know, muttering things over there.”

“I just—I don’t know. There's nothing much to say." Now Steve's really all but flat out staring which is kind of a talent given he's driving, but Danny’s seen this action before and doesn’t want to end up in a wreck. Wouldn’t that just add the final touch to this night. "The road, Steve. Watch the road."

Steve turns back to focus on driving, thankfully, and Danny resumes his watch of the headlights behind them, only… "Hey. Where did—wasn’t Cath behind us a minute ago?"

He watches Steve glance into the rearview, dark eyes then shifting slowly to his and then back again out the front windshield. "Guess not anymore," Steve says with a shrug that Danny could interpret in so many different and variable ways.

"Because?" Because it seems like there's an unspoken—now spoken—'because' that’s floating out there that should be connecting to another thought. Another sentence. Something. 

"Because I don't know, Danny. I don't know where she went. Where she's going. I didn't really ask."

"You didn't—" This makes no sense. "After this night, after everything that just happened and you didn't think to ask what her plans are? She looked pretty upset to be saying goodbye to Kono, same as the rest of us."

"Danno. We're all upset."

"I know, but she's—she’s your—" he sits back, trying to figure out a man who has more pretzeled thinking than anyone he knows. Sighs. "I just figured you and she—I mean, you just lost Doris. Again."

"Yeah, I'm well aware," Steve says. "Tell you the truth, Danny, I really don't know what to think about Doris, and right now, don't want to even try."

"I can understand." He has a hard time tamping down his own volatile feelings about that woman; he can absolutely understand Steve wanting to shelve his own emotions on the subject of Doris, but he was sure Steve would want to be with Catherine when all was said and done. "Still, after all the shit of tonight, I'd've thought you'd want to, you know, be with someone who is—"

"Distracting?"

"Well, yeah. Distracting is not exactly what I was going to say but that makes sense. Distracting would help."

"Emotionally supportive?"

Danny nods. "Yeah, that's good, too. I'm sure that she’s—"

"Smaller than a breadbox?"

"Excuse me?"

Steve laughs, and it's good to see the lines crinkle around his eyes. "I thought we were playing twenty questions."

Danny gapes for a minute. What the hell is Steve even talking about? Shakes his head. "I don't even know who you are sometimes." 

There's a long sigh, and then Steve turns to him. "Sure you do, Danno. I'm the guy who leads a team that's down by one for the unforeseeable future. I'm the guy who's got a mother that hasn't talked a straight line since rising from the grave. I'm the guy who has more questions than there are answers, which reminds me that there are things I have to go do tonight, later," and he puts up a 'don't even start' hand, "and alone, for my own reasons, and lastly… I'm the guy who, for the next sixty minutes, wants nothing more than to sit on my beach with a beer in each hand, listen to the ebb and flow of the tides…"

"Ebb and flow, okay," Danny cuts in because it just seems like he should say something….

"… and be with my partner who is the most distracting, emotionally supportive, annoying…"

Danny feels his heart doing a sudden weird flipping thing. Is that normal? "I don’t believe annoying was ever mentioned." 

"Honest. Straightforward. Truthful…"

"Now you're being redundant."

"Smaller than a breadbox…"

"Okay, that's just insulting is what that is." 

"Danny," Steve says just as Danny realizes they've pulled into Steve's driveway and Steve’s throwing it into park and shutting off the engine, and where did the past ten minutes go? Steve’s made no move to get out of the car, though, and what kind of face is that? Danny's feeling kind of warm or—no, hot. Really hot.

"Danny, I just—I’ve been thinking about some things. I mean thinking for a while, not just right now, and after all the shit that’s gone down today, tonight, I realize, I think I….there’s a few things I need you to know.” 

“Things? You mean things like—“ His mind is splintering off into a million different fragments, and no way in hell can he possibly center on any one thing here, and he can't even finish that sentence. Oh god, it really is starting to feel like a sauna in here.

Steve looks at him full on then. “Shut up, Danny. Please. For a minute, just…let me…  
I want to be with the one person who doesn’t lie to me, who tells me like it is, no bullshit. Who always seems to be standing at my back or by my side, and there’s really only—well, except my sister, maybe, but that’s a big maybe and she’s not here anyway and hell, not like I’ve been having visions of kissing _her_ any time soon—“

“You have visions of kissing your sister?” Danny’s not quite sure, but given his heart rate at the present moment, there’s a chance he may actually be having a true coronary event here.

“No. I just said I didn’t.”

He’s got to slow his breathing. What the hell is Steve saying, exactly? Because it sounds like…it kind of sounds like Steve wants… “Okay, you don’t want to kiss your sister. But then that kinda implies that you’re thinking of—that you maybe—“ and he doesn’t even realize he’s got a finger pointing back to his own chest.

Steve smiles softly. “Yeah, huh. It does, doesn’t it? Implies that, I mean.”

Which really says nothing at all if you listen only to the actual words spoken. For a half a minute that plays out more like a half an hour, Danny’s heart skips along the full gamut of emotional highs and lows, still unsure just what Steve is trying to truly say here, where this is going--until Steve leans over across the seat, across the gear shift, across whatever this divide is that has been separating them lately and lays a hand on his cheek as he leans in to press lips to his. Kissing him. Kissing him on the lips.

Danny smiles against those lips, what else can he do? Because this is the most fucked up night ever, and he's with the most fucked up man ever… who is now pulling away looking all flushed, and kind of flustered, with a sort of half smile-half grin, definitely smug expression, but still looking somewhat tentative at the same time.

Fuck it. Danny can’t help but dive forward, grasping and wadding folds of Steve’s shirt in his fists as he tugs him closer. This man is all he wants, and he presses his own lips and now tongue onto and into Steve’s mouth, because, goddammit, he’ll take whatever this is that Steve is offering, even if it turns out to be only for these sixty minutes on this totally fucked up evening.

If it does turn out to be just that, just a an hour at most here, this night, with this man, who he knows he needs as much as he thinks Steve is saying he needs him in return--if tonight is nothing more than some quiet minutes on a beach under a silvery moon, with only the waves gently lapping the shore and maybe a few stolen kisses breaking the silence, he’ll take it. 

And when Steve goes off to do whatever crazy it is that he says he's doing later—alone, which makes Danny cringe already—well, his beer is still at home in his empty refrigerator that's sitting in the little kitchen in his empty house, and he'll polish the whole six pack off while tucking away these memories that he's sure to cherish forever of how this totally fucked up night ended. With Steve, on his beach, kissing under a shining moon and together listening to the ebb and flow of the ocean's tides.

End.


End file.
